Critics: Missteps in U.S. rush to war
have contributed to Iraqi insurgency

Published: April 10, 2004 8:00PM

WASHINGTON (AP) The deadly insurgency in Iraq is a direct result of tactical missteps by the United States during the rush to war a year ago and in the months afterward, some critics say.

President Bush could have spared himself major headaches if he had heeded the advice of experts who urged him to assemble a larger force, including Muslim soldiers from Turkey and others countries, to take into Iraq. He also should have avoided the assumption that Iraqis would embrace American soldiers as liberators after the ouster of Saddam Hussein.

A healthier regard for Arab perceptions could have helped, said Nayef Samhat, a government and international relations expert at Centre College in Danville, Ky.

The invasion was clearly unprovoked and can be easily seen by many in the Arab-Islamic world as nothing more than the reinvention of imperialism, Samhat said. The images, too, are quite similar to those of Israeli military actions against Palestinians.

Arabs will see the similarity, Samhat said, and associate the two quite easily.

Other U.S. shortcomings, such as failing to work effectively with important Muslim clerics and the inability to halt looting during the fall of Baghdad, have worsened the difficult task of occupying a foreign country.

Most Iraqis had many reasons to hate Saddam Hussein and we removed him. But that did not automatically make them love us, said Duke University professor Ole Holsti.

It is at least reasonable to believe that a more orderly and less chaotic transition to a post-Saddam era would have reduced the kinds of frustration that probably underlies at least some of the current problems, Holsti said.

In hindsight, experts say they believe they have been proved right: The military operation in Iraq should have been an international effort from the start, much like it was in Afghanistan, which eventually was taken over by NATO.

And, they note, the United States should not have dismantled the 200,000-member Iraqi army once Saddam fell.

If that army had been kept intact, it would have been a trained military force to maintain order, said Pepperdine University political scientist Dan Caldwell.

But more important, many critics believe, Bush should have listened to former Army chief of staff Gen. Eric Shinseki, who said a postwar occupying force in Iraq would have to number in the hundreds of thousands.

Such a force, Shinseki said, is needed to maintain security and calm ethnic tensions in the immediate aftermath of the fall of a government.

The Bush administration settled on a force of about 150,000, expecting it would be augmented by eventual support from other countries.

Reinforcements did not arrive right away or in massive numbers. So when looting broke out, there were not enough soldiers on hand to bring the situation under control.

At the time, Shinsekis troop estimate was called wildly off the mark by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.

It turns out Wolfowitz was wildly wrong, said Joseph Nye, a former assistant defense secretary who is dean of Harvard Universitys Kennedy School of Government.

If they had put in more troops, they would have prevented the looting and the situation from deteriorating, Nye said.

Throughout the year since Saddam fell, the United States has struggled to build better ties with moderate Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, who had demanded a swift return to Iraqi sovereignty.

As the insurgency pulsed through Iraq last week, fueled by militias of a more radical Shiite cleric, the more moderate al-Sistani sat silent.

When he finally spoke at midweek, he condemned the tactics of both the U.S. occupation force and the Shiite militias.

We have taken a low-level cleric and made him into a national symbol of resistance against the Americans, just before an Islamic holy day of all times, said George Lopez, international security expert at the University of Notre Dame.

And we have backed al-Sistani, our one major hope for preaching calm and patience among the Shiites, into a corner.